


Remembering A Friend, Mourning A Tragedy: An Op-Ed By Clark Kent

by ErnieThePyle



Category: Superman - All Media Types
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-03
Updated: 2016-09-03
Packaged: 2018-08-12 19:58:47
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,316
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7947118
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ErnieThePyle/pseuds/ErnieThePyle
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The following is a Daily Planet Op-Ed by Senior Reporter Clark Kent reflecting on the murder of a transgender man. It does not necessarily reflect the opinions of the Planet or its staff.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Remembering A Friend, Mourning A Tragedy: An Op-Ed By Clark Kent

Superman saved at least 7,000 people Monday night when he contained a major oil train derailment in downtown New Orleans. But he couldn’t save Steven Chu. 

Chu was hundreds of miles away in the Man of Steel’s native Metropolis. And he was being beaten to death. A group of at least six drunken men accosted Chu and a friend as they were leaving a bar in the Old Quarter. The attack, police say, appears to have been a hate crime spurred by the victims’ status as transgender men. 

The victims appear to have been headed home when they ran into their assailants. There’s no indication of a provocation. But that didn’t stop the slurs and epithets from being hurled and according to police, within a matter of minutes Chu’s friend Henry Ekks had a concussion and Chu himself was lying on the cold concrete sidewalk, a piece of broken glass jabbed into his carotid artery. 

Steven Chu was a friend. But I couldn’t save him. And neither could Superman, this city’s sworn protector. I wish he could have. But the reality is we can’t always save Steven Chu, no matter how hard we try or how fast we move. There’s not a cape around every corner and down every alley. But that doesn’t mean there can’t be heroes, people just brave enough to treat everyone with the dignity and respect of a human being.

As much as we need heroes, not one of them, ordinary or extraordinary, can help Steven. But perhaps we can learn from his tragedy and apply it to the future. For Steven all we can really do is be better and do better. And remember. 

I think I’ll remember Steven’s laugh the most. I hadn’t known him very well but the few times I had the pleasure of his company, the thing that always struck me was the laugh that started deep in his lungs. He worked so hard to find the humor and to let the laughs carry him through even the worst days. 

Steven was a 25 year-old medical student and a participant in a night school journalism class I sometimes help teach at Metropolis Polytechnic. He came up to me after class a few months ago to pick the brain of a real reporter. I like to think I helped him. But I wish I could have helped him more. 

Steven was born Sara. But he, and yes, Steven was a he, never really felt comfortable in his own skin, until at least age 10 when he finally convinced his mother to let him wear baggy jeans and start referring to him with male pronouns. It took her 10 years to go a month without slipping, he once told me, but then one day she realized it’d been six months and spontaneously hugged him, telling him how proud she was to have a son, to have him as her male child. 

Steven cried when he told me that story. He’d been blasting me with questions about the kind of minorities I cover as a reporter when he asked about my experiences with those outside traditional gender norms. I told him I’d encountered many different kinds of people from every possible walk of life, but he was perhaps the first transgender man I’d known in more than passing. When I said that, he took a deep breath and ran through his own story in a rapid staccato.

That story was at once a core part of his identity but also something Steven tried so hard not to let define him. What Steven really wanted to be defined by, he told me, was helping people. He’d envisioned life as a nonprofit doctor who would travel the world bringing medicine and care to the most far-flung places that needed it. He studied medicine at Metropolis University and pursued journalism on the side so that he could tell the stories of the people he worked with in the most personal and authentic voice. 

Living as a transitioning transgender man was extraordinarily difficult, Steven told me. And he’d faced the blunt end of discrimination more times than he could count, from school nurses who insisted on treating him like a girl, to peers who would spit on him and throw bottles of glitter in his face. So Steven turned to humor, fighting to laugh through the pain. 

Steven’s laugh was a way to get over the otherness of his skin, the nature of his identity that is so very alien to the rest of us. But the thing about aliens, Steven liked to say, is that they’re only foreign until you welcome them in. That line always makes me smile and I hope to remember it for as long as I can, just as I remember Steven as a man and a human being, one who just happened to be transgender. 

By accounts, Steven had apparently tried to laugh off the insults Monday night in the Old Quarter. But his assailants were having none of it. Witnesses say the men staggered forward threateningly when Steven tried to deflect their ignorance. He kept it up as they approached and kept laughing until the men were just inches away. And still Steven tried to remain calm, at least until the first blow fell. And then the second, and a third. 

Nearby police officers patrolling on foot arrived soon after the altercation began. But it was already too late to help Steven, although all the men who attacked him are believed to be sitting in a Metropolis jail cell on $1 million bonds as they await murder charges. 

But the indignities of Steven’s life didn’t end with the people who killed him. Even as they waited for an ambulance, witnesses say the officers debated whether or not to administer first aid themselves. One apparently told the other he’d no intention of “touching that thing,” although neither officer’s name has been released by Metropolis PD. 

Steven was not a thing. No human being is. No matter how they were born or how they live. And despite what you might believe otherwise, the fact that he called himself a man was no one’s business but his own. And he was as entitled to dignity and to life as anyone less alien. We just have to welcome him in. 

What happened to Steven stirs so many emotions in me: the anger at what he suffered, the guilt for having not been there to help him, the sadness at a world that will never know that full laugh and that dedicated attitude. 

I know I started this story with the world’s superheroes, but this isn’t about them, those people we depend on to solve our problems for us. Because this isn’t a problem they can fix. And it’s not a story about saving the world, just saving one man, or one woman, or one individual at a time.

This article is really about Steven Chu and it’s about honoring his legacy. We can be better than six drunken men fueled by ignorance and hate. We can do better than referring to another human being as a thing. I know we’re better than that. We must be better than that.

Steven Chu was a transgender man. It’s how he lived and how he died. But he didn’t let it define him and neither should we. He was a human being deserving of dignity, he was a kind soul dedicated to helping others, and he was a friend. Nothing else should really matter, not for the capes or the civilians, those with powers and those with the power of a laugh. 

“I will miss my Steven so much,” his mother Mei told me, fighting through tears when I asked if there was anything she wanted to say about her child. “I’ll never get back all the things that made him my son.”


End file.
